Ruminations about the mysteries and thrills of life

November 08, 2013

This week Thomas & Mercer, the mystery and thriller imprint of Amazon Publishing, is bringing out a re-edited version of my thriller A Fine and Dangerous Season. My heart is pounding against my ribcage with excitement. Does this mean more sales than ever? Does this mean I will become an author who can replace a day job’s earnings with royalties? Well, we’ll find out. But I figure at what may be a turning point, it’s also time to look back. How did I get here anyway?

Unlike so many writing friends, I never had my heart set on being an author. In fact, I never had my heart set on any one career. Before writing my first book, I worked on Capitol Hill as counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee (see photo on left -- that's me on the bottom right with Vice President Mondale et al.), ran for Congress, joined a high tech telecommunications company, and then gave up a sabbatical to jump to a small networking start-up. At the latter I loved my boss and co-workers, but after five years or so, I was feeling a little stale when I came across a course on mystery writing at UC Berkeley Extension and signed up. Margaret Lucke was a terrific teacher and gave me the impetus to start writing that first novel. However, after six months, I was still restless at my day job. So, I did what anyone in Silicon Valley would do – I started a company. No boredom there. It was years of 80-hour weeks while my half-done manuscript moldered in a desk drawer. Then the company began to get some traction, and I had a little free time. So out came the manuscript. I wrote for an hour weekdays starting at 5AM and, by packing a spare battery or two, I could rap on my keyboard for the six hours of cross-country airplane flights.

Once completed, I sent Dot Dead to agents. Lots of encouraging words, but only one word mattered – “yes” – and I didn’t hear that one from the first few dozen agents I queried. Finally, a former investment banker just starting a literary agency called and signed me up. Then it was her turn to circulate the manuscript, to publishers this time. Again the encouraging words without a contract. After around six months, though, came three yesses in the same week. We went with Midnight Ink, a prolific publisher of mysteries. A year-and-a-half after we signed the contract, the book was out. Oh, rapture! I was an author. At Book Expo America, Margery Flax and her crew of volunteers from Mystery Writers of America rounded up potential readers, and I signed dozens of copies (at left). While signing at the Midnight Ink booth during that BEA, I found myself next to a couple who had written a how-to book on tantric sex. “It really works,” the female co-author assured me.

What next? The company I had started was sold and then sold again. I decided to give this writing biz a fling and started writing full-time. Midnight Ink brought out Smasher, which made it onto a national mystery bestseller list and was even optioned for film. However, it didn’t exactly make it on to the NY Times bestseller list. Have you heard the joke about the difference between a mystery and a thriller? An extra digit in the advance. So I drew on my experience in Washington and wrote a thriller. My new agent sent it to the big deal publishers. Shades of the past. Lots of compliments but no “yes.” Well, I really am a Silicon Valley guy and it was time to try something new. I published Drop By Drop as an ebook only. And the experiment worked. I sold more copies and made more money than I had with either Midnight Ink book, but still not enough to replace what I’d been earning in my day job. Time to try again. Sitting in a café around the corner from my house, I wrote another thriller called A Fine and Dangerous Season set against the background of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

After I’d finished, I went to a New Year’s Party, and the host asked if I would consider going back to a Silicon Valley job. For something different and exciting, said I. She passed the word along and a few months later, I found myself at a genetics company even though I could barely spell “DNA.” It was a thrill to be there working with doctors and researchers trying to cure cancer and other genetic diseases, but then the company was sold last March and I decided to give this writer business another try.

In the meantime, A Fine and Dangerous Season made it to #8 on Barnesandnoble.com and #34 on Amazon.com. I finished a draft of a manuscript called Temple Mount – not surprisingly a thriller set in Jerusalem. I needed something to give it an extra boost. So I tried Kickstarter, which provides a platform to crowd-source funding for creative projects. With it I would raise money to print books, do marketing, throw a launch party, and more. But most important I would gather up a cadre of fans and friends who would become advocates of the book. Well, it worked. We raised $18K from around 200 supporters. Over 50 people paid $80 or more to have a shot at editing the book. A high school friend made over 3500 comments and suggestions. Instead of relying on a publisher, we had 200 people ready to stand behind the book. (You can see the video and site we used here.)

Ah, man plans and God laughs. In September I received an email from Amazon Publishing. They were impressed with how A Fine and Dangerous Season had been doing and wanted to bring it out under their Thomas & Mercer imprint. They spelled out the marketing resources Amazon would put behind the book and I was in – pending a check with the backers of Temple Mount. I wrote to them with the news and asked if we could postpone publication of Temple Mount since it made no sense publishing the two books on top of each other. I offered to refund anyone’s pledge. I was overwhelmed with the good wishes I received. I really did have 200 supporters who were invested in the success of my writing career. That felt pretty good.

So that brings us to now. Six weeks after signing a contract with Amazon Publishing, a re-edited version of A Fine and Dangerous Season is out as an e-book and for the first time, as a paper-and-ink “real” book. The hiatus between contract and signing on Fine and Dangerous was six weeks as compared to the 16 months for Dot Dead.

August 11, 2012

Wow. I heard Penelope Lively, one of my favorite authors, talk about book length; she noted that a disproportionate number of her favorite novels were short. She mentioned William Golding in particular whose Lord of the Flies comes in at 59,900 words.

I take solace in Ms. Lively’s comments. So many of my thriller-writing friends and colleagues whine that their editors are making them cut their manuscripts from, say, 140,000 words down to 120,000. Still 120,000 words is a long book. I think there’s a certain machismo among thriller authors that impels them to write big books, books that take some effort to heft, books that take up lots of room on the shelf.

When I write, I have the opposite problem. My first draft typically comes in around 50,000 words and then I have to figure out how to lengthen it. One reason for the short length is that I don’t do outlines. In my hurry to find out what happens next to my characters, I sometimes write too cryptically in draft #1. I know what’s happening in my head but do not put enough on the page for a reader to follow. Filling in the necessary details is a chore for subsequent drafts.

Why am I so sensitive about word count right now? On August 20, my next book, A Fine and Dangerous Season, will be a Nook First selection. (That means it’s available for download exclusively on Barnesandnoble.com for four weeks.) It’s 61,865 words long, about the same length as Erich Maria Remarque's classic, All Quiet on the Western Front.

I suspect a thriller that length works better as an ebook. The machismo of carrying around a 500-page tome disappears because a Nook or Kindle is the same handy size no matter how big the book files inside it are.

May 03, 2012

Out of the blue, a pair of award-winning screenwriters optioned my second book, Smasher, back in 2010. Reading the actual script last fall, I could just imagine the characters up on the silver screen in the local multiplex. Alas, not going to happen--at least not anytime soon. The option expired a few weeks ago. The screenwriters told me they have picked up assignments from producers who liked their treatment, but Smasher: The Movie was not going to be “greenlighted.” My agent went on suicide watch, but I had expected nothing so wasn’t disappointed (much).

What about my next book? In her review of Drop By Drop, Lynn Farris wrote she “wouldn't be surprised to see this as an upcoming movie. Five stars out of five." So why not Drop By Drop as feature-length film even if not Smasher? Why not go along with the fantasy? After all, I live in the world of fiction. Let’s cast the film!

Here’s a précis of Drop By Drop:

Stanford professor Sam Rockman suffers the crushing loss of his wife in a bombing at San Francisco Airport. Seeking meaning in the ruins of his life, he accepts an offer to work for the Senate Intelligence Committee. What Sam wants out of his stint in D.C. is revenge for the death of his wife. What he gets is danger and betrayal. Secret documents are showing up on his doorstep. Russians are trying to poison him. Sam finds allies among a savvy Kentucky senator, a billionaire investment banker, his wife's old rabbi, and the president's national security advisor. Too often, he finds himself thrown together with his counterpart on the other side of the aisle, the whip-smart, six-footer Cecilia Plant. Mourning still for his wife, Sam steels himself against Cecilia's appeal and remains suspicious of her motives.

So we have to cast Sam and Cecilia first. We know he’s six feet tall because he’s the same height as she is. Other than that we don’t know what he looks like. Kind of nerdy maybe. After all, he is a Stanford history professor in his mid-thirties. Lots of candidates then but I’m going to with Jake Gyllenhaal. He’s six feet tall and 32 years old. Earnest in Love and Other Drugs, driven in Source Code. He should be bankable, too.

Next is Cecilia. Getting this part right is the key to the movie. Readers love her. Joe Hartlaub wrote in his review in Bookreporter.com, “With regard to the characters, Plant almost steals the book from Rockman; if Raffel would see fit to bring her back in a future work, I certainly wouldn’t object.” Here she is in her first meeting with Sam:

“We need to get the motherfuckers who did that.” She didn’t snarl as she cursed. She spoke in soft tones, as if to minimize the attention that would come unbidden to a foul-mouthed, red-headed woman with a seventy-five inch span between the tips of her heels and the crown of her head.

She’s six-feet tall (the extra three inches are from her heels) and an ex-athlete. Wait, I got it! Adrianne Palicki. She’s within an inch of six-feet. She can definitely handle the bad language--having played bad-girl Tyra Collette in "Friday Night Lights." While in high school she played basketball and ran track. I’ve seen her on the screen as both a blonde and as a brunette; no reason to think she wouldn’t look just as great with auburn tresses. (Calling Clairol!) And even when she played a bad girl, she projected underlying intelligence.

Did I mention I myself worked for the Senate just as Sam Rockman did? One of my colleagues back in those days was Fred Thompson who (much later) showed his acting chops on TV’s "Law and Order." And he actually served as a senator from Tennessee. Not too much of a stretch then to see him playing a member of the upper house representing the neighboring state of Kentucky. (Always glad to help out a former colleague.)

Billionaire investment banker George Fairchild has made the Forbes list of richest people under 40. Here’s where we first see him in the book:

George measured no taller than five-five, an inch shorter than Rachel and weighed in at about 130, only five pounds more than her. No banker’s suit for George. He wore khakis with a crease sharp enough to slice a loaf of bread and a blue-striped button-down crisp enough to crackle like cellophane.

Let’s go with Ryan Phillippe most recently seen on TV in "Damages." A baby-faced 38 he makes the age cut.

My own rabbi says she likes the fact that rabbis in my novels are not figures of fun. Can comedic actor Paul Rudd play a serious clergyman? I say yes.

The president’s national security advisor is a tough, cigarette-smoking, New York dame. Let’s go with Dianne Wiest of "In Treatment" and Hannah and Her Sisters.

And finally, what about President Lucas? Here we see him on TV:

The guy looked so damned presidential. He reached the same six foot four Lincoln had. His hair was swept back in a Reaganesque pompadour. An aversion to ties part of his brand, he wore an open-neck French blue shirt and navy blazer. He conveyed to the voters that he was no empty suit, but the perfect fit of his clothing, the way his jacket hung from his shoulders, distinguished him from Joe Sixpack even more surely than gray pinstripes.

Here’s the casting coup of the 21st century. Mitt Romney was a neighbor of a friend of mine. I met him at her birthday party. Don’t know how good an actor he would be, but from the description of President Lucas above it wouldn’t be much of a stretch, would it? And it’s my hunch that he will be looking for work after the first Tuesday of November.

Thanks for humoring me in my reverie. (But if the agents of Mr. Gyllenhaal or Ms. Palicki see this post, please do not hesitate to get in touch.)

Keith

Keith’s Drop By Drop is available for a free download from Amazon.com through Saturday. (Click here.)

October 24, 2011

Is there one universe or many? What is the meaning of life? What happened to Jimmy Hoffa?

There are some questions that just cannot be answered.

As readers of this blog know, I am undertaking an experiment in e-publishing. My first two novels, both published in trade paper, did fine (and continue to sell). But I couldn't resist climbing aboard the ebook express and so I uploaded my latest effort, Drop By Drop: A Thriller, onto Amazon.com, BN.com, Smashwords, and Apple's iBookstore. Generally, all seems to be going well. While I miss bookstore signings, the fact I have already made more in royalties on Drop than on my last traditionally published book provides some solace.

But in the world of e-publishing, mysteries abound. There are questions for which I have no answers. Here are four:

1. How do people find out about an ebook original? I tried a little experimental advertising of Drop By Drop -- sales were not affected. Drop was greeted by a bunch of online reviews which definitely helped. Lately, there have been fewer. Still, sales have not gone down and are even trending upward. My experience is not unique. I have spoken to a couple of friends whose books were made available on the Kindle with little uptake. Only months later did their sales zoom. Why? They don't know. There's an invisible hand at work, I guess.

2. Living as I do in Silicon Valley, a few miles away from 1 Infinite Loop (Apple HQ), many readers tell me they have purchased their copy of Drop from the iBookstore. I also read about authors selling scads of books on BN.com. So here's the question: Why do I sell 20 times more books on Amazon than Barnes and Noble's BN.com and 9 times more than on Apple's iBookstore?

3. The United States has about 312 million people. The United Kingdom has about 64 million or about 20% as many. According to estimates, 750M paper-and-ink books were sold in the US in 2010 and 229M in the UK or about 30% as many. I did some Googling. According to these links, US ebook sales were $441M in 2010 and in the UK were £180M or about 60% of the US total. So why am I selling 80 times more books on Amazon.com this month than on Amazon.co.uk?

4. My second book, Smasher, made it onto a national bestseller list and was optioned for film. Reviews in paper-and-ink newspapers and mystery and publishing magazines were great. Drop By Drop was reviewed only in online publications. Smasher sells for $2.99 and Drop for $3.99. Nevertheless, Drop is selling 14 times more copies than Smasher on Amazon.com so far this month. How come?

Attention: there may be a Nobel Prize in store for whoever can answer the first question of this post, but all you get for answering any of the four ebook questions is my thanks and appreciation.

September 06, 2011

The reading world is in the midst of a war over formats. We've all been following the back-and-forth between Kindle/Nook partisans and those who defiantly hold on to their paper-and-ink books. Here's which side I come down on: both.

Don't you think we authors should strive to ensure our novels can be read however our readers want to read them -- whether as words on a paper page or on an LCD screen? And what about those who might want to use their ears rather than their eyes to "read" a book? Fine with me. Let's add one more option to the mix then -- audiobooks.

My first two books have just hit the format trifecta. Dot Deadand Smasher are now available as audio downloads for iPods, MP3 players, and such on both Audible.com andAmazon.com. (You can listen to samples here and here.) Both are still available as ebooks and trade paperbacks. (Readers, pick your poison.) My third novel, Drop By Drop, is currently available only as an ebook, but if it continues to sell well (fingers crossed), I'm hoping it will be offered in print and as an audio book as well.

One side benefit to all these different formats is a flowering of covers. Dot Dead has one cover doing double duty for the ebook and trade paper and another for the audio version. Smasher -- lucky fellow -- has a different cover for all three formats. Drop By Drop is available in just the one format and hence has only one cover at present. If my arithmetic is correct, that makes a total of six covers. I'm pretty fond of all of them, but I do wonder which ones you prefer. Please let me know in your comments below or over at Inkspot!

July 27, 2011

Zelda Shluker of Hadassah Magazine, the largest circulation Jewish periodical in North America, did a summer "round-up of new thrills and chills" and included an insightful review of Drop By Drop. It's interesting though, that as perceptive as the review might be, there's no good quote that can be pulled out of it. Please let me know what you think of the review.

When Sam Rockman’s pregnant wife, Rachel, is killed in a terrorist explosion at San Francisco airport, his life and psyche are upended: He leaves his position as a professor of history at Stanford to become staff director to a senior member on the Intelligence Committee. The usually liberal Rockman is so angry he is ready to support a bill that will let the C.I.A. and the military operate inside the United States against terrorists.

But the administration is trigger-happy. After hazardous material is found in a Florida highway crash—the administration says the trail leads to a Russian source by way of Sudan—the president has bombers and cruise missiles ready to attack Sudan. There is a strong movement afoot to repeal the 22nd amendment, to allow the tough anti-terror president to run for a third term.

The plot of Drop By Drop is not inherently Jewish, but Sam is, and you are reminded of this throughout; when the president, who invites Sam (who becomes a target of a killer) to head the national anti-terrorism effort, worries that having so many Jews on his staff will trigger paranoia “out there.” Though Sam believes Judaism is less about that you think and more about what you do, his desperate search for tikkun olam is part of learning how to live with his grief.

July 05, 2011

Now that I’ve been writing full-time for about four years, friends and relatives are finally getting used to the idea. I’ve impressed upon them that writing a novel does indeed count as work. They have learned not to refer to my time in the software world as “back when you were working.” And maybe out of fear of being a defendant in a wrongful death action brought by my heirs, they no longer ask if I am enjoying “retirement.” That vein that starts throbbing on my forehead gives them a warning that an apoplectic fit cannot be far away. In fact, many of those friends tell me something like, “Actually, I’ve read your latest book and it’s pretty good.” I don’t know if I should be insulted by the tone of surprise, but I’ve decided to just go with it and say “thank you.”

Well, I can’t leave well enough alone. I’m screwing the whole thing up. I’ve gone and taken on a day job. Why would I do something like that? I cannot say that writing novels has been quite as lucrative as working in software, but it’s not just the money. (I can’t say money plays no role at all. It was Dr. Johnson who said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”) For my entire post-college life I’ve just gotten that itch to try something new every four, five, or six years. And happy as I was spending my days in my neighborhood café rapping out the stories of Ian and Rowena and Sam and Cecilia, I still am excited to be started something new. Leaving aside a few flings like my six months as a gambler at the race track, I figure this newest incarnation is my fifth.

I’ve overcome the shame of admitting that I went to law school. Even worse, I went intending to become a corporate lawyer. A summer job at a Wall Street firm cured me of that folly, and I decided instead to do my bit in saving the world. (Another folly.) I pounded the hallways of the Capitol in Washington and was hired as the junior of three lawyers on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Before the end of my first year, the other two had left. I was 27 years old and the senior lawyer on the committee overseeing the government’s secret intelligence activities. Holy s**t! (I mined that experience in my latest book, Drop By Drop.) Then I got a little too big for my britches and went home to Palo Alto to run for Congress. My experience running for elective office was like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. No matter how much fun the ride was, what I remember is the landing. Splat – like an overripe tomato hitting a concrete floor! So ended my life in politics and career #1.

Next I landed at ROLM Corporation in Silicon Valley, where Ken Oshman, a brilliant and demanding executive who’d been CEO of the company from his 20s, took a chance on me. I was there when we introduced the first successful corporate voicemail systems. After we sold the company to IBM, I stuck with high tech, but eventually found myself in a company where I loved my colleagues, my boss, and the product, but I was still getting a little bored. So I did what you do in Silicon Valley under such circumstances. I left my job and started a company. That was the end of career #2 as a high tech employee and the beginning of #3 as an entrepreneur.

After six years of 70 hour weeks, we sold the company. Part of closing the deal was promising to stick around for awhile. Once my indentured servitude had lapsed though, I left and started casting around for my next move. I thought about starting another company, but an old Japanese proverb kept running through my head: “Every person should walk to the top of Mount Fuji, but only a fool does it twice.”

And so ended my third career and the start of #4 as a novelist. I love writing. When I walk into my neighborhood café, the staff turns down the music and brings me my pot of green tea. I put on noise-canceling headphones and pretty soon I’ve made the jump to another world where I have adventures as another person – one braver, smarter, and more attractive to women than I am. I’ve written five manuscripts. Midnight Ink published Dot Dead and Smasher. Drop By Drop has just come out as an ebook original – which is going great. I have delivered two more manuscripts to my agent. Writing is a great gig. But still, dammit, I found myself needing to scratch that itch to try something new.

I knew I didn’t want to do the same thing again. Whenever I thought about it, a picture of Mt. Fuji would pop into my brain.

At a New Year’s party at the beginning of the year, I mentioned to a friend that I was feeling that itch to try something new. She said something to a friend of hers, who in turn said something to her husband. And the upshot of all that? I’ve just started a job at a genetic sequencing company. What the heck is that? Well, it turns out that humans have 21,000 genes that are written in something like computer code. It cost over a billion dollars to sequence all of a human’s genes in the Human Genome Project that finished up in 2003. The company I’m at now does it for less than one hundred thousandth as much. Why does it matter? Sometimes when one or more of those genes run amok, cancer results. Anomalies in other genes can lead to a predisposition for heart disease or Alzheimer’s. Researchers are figuring all this out. In the not distant future, it will possible to take medication targeting our own specific genetic make-up (or genome). We’ll find out if we have a predisposition for diabetes or cancer and have the option to change our diet and exercise patterns accordingly. I participated in Silicon Valley’s Internet revolution. This was a chance to participate in the personalized medicine revolution that is definitely coming! Could not say no!

It turns out to be harder to leave career #4 behind than my first three. On the job only for a week and I already have ideas for thrillers set in the world of DNA sequencing and research. Yes, I am starting another career, but without abandoning the old one. I am still an author.

June 20, 2011

San Jose Mercury News Columnist Mike Cassidy and I sat down in my living room to discuss ebooks and my writing career. Over on the left is the online version of his story that ran on the front page of last Friday's business section. (Click here to read.) The headline hints at a peculiar phenomenon. I fled high tech to get into novel-writing. Now by publishing Drop By Drop as an ebook, I find myself living in a mash-up of the software and authorial worlds.

BTW, did you know The Merc trails only The New York Times and LA Times in circulation among big city dailies? (Click here.)